Belief, Illusion and the Ouija: Contacting the Dead

Harry Houdini once said, “What the eyes see and what the ears hear… the mind believes.” This quote was stated by one of the greatest escape artist and illusionist of all time, and it reveals his secret. The human mind is structured to believe what it sees and fear what it does not see. An example of this is contacting the dead. Contacting the dead has been around for many centuries. Throughout the ages people have made several “devices” to contact the dead, but only spiritualists were able to. This changed in 1890 when the Ouija board was invented. An Ouija board is a board filled with letters, numbers, and a planchette. This invention changed everything by letting families contact the dead. Now, normal people could communicate with the

Many people made different devices to contact the dead. In 1890 a man by the name of Elijah Bond released the elusive Ouija board selling for only $1.50. It became a huge success, people across the United States wanted this “game”. One of the main groups targeted by this marketing were families because the Ouija board was not sold as a spiritualist device, it was sold as a board game
In the early 1900s there were many anti spiritualists that were determined to prove that devices, such as the Ouija board were false. The most famous of these anti spiritualists was Harry Houdini. Although there were large efforts to expose spiritual devices they never succeeded. People were too obsessed with spiritualism to believe them. Plus spiritualism and contacting the dead was considered normal.
In 1929 outside of Buffalo New York at the Cattaraugus Reservation, a woman named Nancy Bowen was curious about her husband's recent death and demanded answers. She used an Ouija board to contact her dead husband. The board said that he was murdered. In shock Nancy dug even deeper to find more answers. The eventually revealed that Clothilde Marchand was the murderer. Filled with rage Nancy went to Marchand’s house and beat her down with a hammer. Shortly afterwards Clothilde was dead. An Ouija board had created a